Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law, and Acting Professor of Law, at the UCLA School of Law. Professor Abou El Fadl is one of the leading authorities in Islamic law in the United States and Europe. Raised in Egypt and Kuwait, he trained in Islamic legal sciences in Egypt, Kuwait, and the United States; he has clerked for the Arizona Supreme Court, practiced immigration and investment law, and worked with such human rights organizations as Human Rights Watch and Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights. Professor Abou El Fadl’s recent books include: Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (forthcoming); Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (forthcoming); Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam (2001); and The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourse (1997, banned in Saudi Arabia). He holds degrees from Yale University (B.A.), University of Pennsylvania (J.D.), and Princeton University (Ph.D.); at UCLA he teaches courses in Islamic law, human rights and terrorism, and Middle Eastern investment law.
Victor Anderson is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School. A member of the Vanderbilt faculty since 1992, he teaches and writes about 20th century ethics, American pragmatism, religion and morality, and African American political theology. He is the author of two books, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) and Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology (1998). A former pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, Professor Anderson is active in the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Society of Christian Ethics, and the American Academy of Religion (for which he serves on the steering committee for the Philosophy of Religion group). He received his B.A. in history and theology from Trinity Christian College, his M.Div. and M.Th. from Calvin Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University.
J.
Budziszewski, a political philosopher
with special interests in the problem of toleration and in the tradition
of Natural Law, holds joint appointments in the departments of Government
and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of five
scholarly books, including The Revenge of Conscience (1999),
Written on the Heart (1997), and True Tolerance (1992),
he has contributed articles and reviews to numerous journals, including
the American Journal of Jurisprudence, First Things, the Review of Politics,
Public Choice, and the American Political Science Review. His current
work focuses on the pathologies that are symptomatic of the repression
of moral knowledge; that is, of the attempt to convince ourselves that
we don't know what we really do know.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a columnist at The Washington Post, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Co-Chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. His column appears in some 90 newspapers Dionne spent 14 years with The New York Times, reporting on state and local government, national politics, and from around the world, including stints in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. The Los Angeles Times praised his coverage of the Vatican as the best in two decades. In 1990, Dionne joined The Washington Post as a reporter, covering national politics. His best-selling book, Why Americans Hate Politics was published in 1991. The book, which Newsday called "a classic in American political history" and National Review described as "a gripping page-by-page analysis of what ails us", won The Los Angeles Times book prize and was a National Book Award nominee. Dionne began his op-ed column for the Post in 1993 and has been a regular commentator on politics on both television and radio. Other books include They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996) and What's God Got To Do With the American Experiment? (2000) which he co-edited with John DiIulio. He is a regular political analyst on CNN and National Public Radio.
Avery
Cardinal Dulles, S.J., is the Laurence
J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University,
a position he has held since 1988. After graduating from Harvard College
in 1940, he spent a year and a half in Harvard Law School before serving
in the United States Navy, emerging with the rank of lieutenant. Upon
his discharge from the Navy in 1946, Avery Dulles entered the Jesuit
Order, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1956. He was created a
Cardinal of the Catholic Church in Rome on February 21, 2001 by Pope
John Paul II. The author of over 650 articles on theological topics,
Cardinal Dulles has published twenty-one books, his most recent being
The New World of Faith (2000). Past President of both the Catholic Theological
Society of America and the American Theological Society, Cardinal Dulles
is presently a consultant for the Committee on Doctrine of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops and an Associate Fellow of the Woodstock
Theological Center in Washington, D.C.
Jean
Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago
Divinity School, the Department of Political Science, and the Committee
on International Relations. A political philosopher, her task has been
to show the connections between our political and ethical convictions.
Her books include Public Man, Private Woman (2d edition, 1993);
Women and War (1995); Democracy on Trial (1996); Real
Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life (2000), and most recently,
Who Are We? (2000). Professor Elshtain is also co-chair of the
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Chair of the Council on Civil Society, and a member
of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
University and the National Humanities Center. She is a frequent contributor
to numerous scholarly, intellectual and popular journals.
Richard
Garnett is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Notre
Dame Law School. Garnett received his B.A. from Duke University and
his J.D. from Yale University Law School, where he served as senior
editor of the Yale Law Journal and as editor of the Yale Journal of
Law & the Humanities. He clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist
and Chief Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals,
before taking his post at Notre Dame in 1999. He practiced law for two
years at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca
& Lewin, specializing in criminal-defense, religious-liberty, and
education-reform matters. At Notre Dame, he teaches courses on criminal
law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, and the death penalty.
Frank Keating is the Governor of Oklahoma. He received his A.B. from Georgetown University and his J.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Keating began his career of government service as a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after which he served as an assistant district attorney in Tulsa. In 1972 he was elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and in 1974 he won a seat in the Oklahoma State Senate, where he served for seven years ultimately as minority leader. In 1981 he was appointed by President Reagan as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma, and was later elected chairman of all of the U.S. Attorneys. From 1985 to 1991 Keating served the Reagan and Bush administrations as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Associate Attorney General, and General Counsel and Acting Deputy Secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in these capacities he oversaw the operations of virtually every federal law enforcement agency. He was elected Governor of Oklahoma in 1994, just five months before the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. As governor during the crisis, he was instrumental in organizing rescue and recovery operations and in facilitating aid to the bombing victims and their families. He was reelected in 1998.
David Novak Professor
Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies
at the University of Toronto since 1997 as Professor of the Study of
Religion, Professor of Philosophy, and with appointments in University
College, and member of University College, the Joint Centre for Bioethics
and the Institute of Medical Science. Professor Novak is a founder,
vice-president and co-ordinator of the Panel of Inquiry on Jewish Law
of the union for Traditional Judaism. He helped found the Institute
for Traditional Judaism in Teaneck, New Jersey, serves as secretary-treasurer
of the Institute of Religion and Public Life in New York and is on the
editorial board of its monthly journal First Things. He is a Fellow
of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Academy for Jewish
Philosophy. During the academic year 1992-93, he was a Fellow of the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
He has lectured throughout North America as well as in Israel, Europe,
and South Africa. Professor Novak is the author of ten books, including
Natural Law in Judaism (1998) and Covenantal Rights (2000). His articles
have appeared in numerous scholarly and intellectual
journals.
Antonin Scalia is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He received his A.B. from Georgetown University and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), and his LL.B from Harvard Law School. He was a Sheldon Fellow of Harvard University from 1960-1961, and from 1961-67 he served in private practice in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a professor of law at the University of Virginia (1967-71) and The University of Chicago (1977-82), and visiting professor of law at Georgetown and Stanford Universities. He served the federal government as General Counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy from 1971-1972, Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 1972-1974, and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel from 1974-1977. He was appointed Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1982. President Reagan nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat September 26, 1986.
Paul Simon is a professor at Southern Illinois University, where he teaches classes in political science, history and journalism, and is the founder and director of the Public Policy Institute at the Carbondale campus. From 1951-53 he served in the in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps as a special agent along the Iron Curtain in Europe. He was elected to the Illinois House in 1954 and to the Illinois Senate in 1962, winning the Independent Voters of Illinois' "Best Legislator Award" every session of his 14 year career in the state legislature. Simon was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, and the U.S. Senate in 1984, from which he retired in 1996 as Illinois’ senior senator. During his service in Congress, he crafted legislation in a wide range of issue areas including education, disability policy and foreign affairs. Simon holds over 54 honorary degrees and has written 19 books (four with co-authors) including Lovejoy: Martyr to Freedom (1964); Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness (1965); The Once and Future Democrats (1982); P.S. The Autobiography of Paul Simon (1998); and How to Get into Politics - and Why (with Michael Dukakis, 2000).
Beth Wilkinson served as Special Attorney to the United States Attorney General assigned to the prosecution team for the Oklahoma City bombing trials. She worked closely with the survivors and family members of the victims, prepared them for their testimony at trial and the penalty phases, and delivered the closing arguments for the penalty phases in both the McVeigh and Nichols trials. Prior to this, she was the Principal Deputy Chief of the Terrorism and Violent Crime Section for the Department of Justice where she supervised other attorneys and advised the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General on policy initiatives. She also served as Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General on matters involving domestic terrorism, narcotics trafficking, youth violence and other criminal law issues. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, she prosecuted numerous trials and appeals including the conviction of a narco-terrorist charged with the bombing of a civilian airliner. She began her legal career in the U.S. Army as an Assistant to the General Counsel for the Office of the Army General Counsel. She also served as legal advisor to the Secretary of the Army for intelligence and national security matters and as Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in which she helped prosecute Manuel Noriega. Ms. Wilkinson is currently Co-Chair of The Constitution Project’s Death Penalty Initiative, and a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm of Latham & Watkins
